When the Garden Was Eden: Clyde, the Captain, Dollar Bill, and the Glory Days of the New York Knicks

By Harvey Araton

Book Overview

"Brilliant . . . smartly written, featuring tons of interviews with the Knicks of the Phil Jackson-Clyde-Reed era." -- New York Magazine

"Harvey Araton has evocatively rendered the team that New York never stops pining for--the Old Knicks. More than a nostalgic chronicle . . . it's a portrait of a group of proud, idiosyncratic men and the city that needed them." -- Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx is Burning

In the tradition of The Boys of Summer and The Bronx Is Burning, New York Times sports columnist Harvey Araton delivers a fascinating look at the 1970s New York Knicks--part autobiography, part sports history, part epic, set against the tumultuous era when Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, and Bill Bradley reigned supreme in the world of basketball.

The late 1960s and early 1970s, in New York City and America at large, were years marked by political tumult, social unrest . . . and the best professional basketball ever played. Paradise, for better or worse, was a hardwood court in midtown Manhattan.

Harvey Araton has followed the Knicks, old and new, for decades--first as a teenage fan, then as a young sports reporter with the New York Post, and now as a writer and columnist for the New York Times. When the Garden Was Eden is the definitive account of the New York Knicks in their vintage pomp. With measured prose and shoe-leather reporting, Araton relives their most glorious triumphs and bitter rivalries, and casts light on a team all but forgotten outside of pregame highlight reels and nostalgic reunions at the Garden.

Araton's revealing story of the Knicks' heyday is far more than a review of one of basketball's greatest teams' inspiring story--it is, at heart, a stirring recreation of a time and place when the NBA championships defined the national dream.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061956244
• ISBN13: 9780061956249
• Release Date: October 2012
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

One of the finest sports books I've ever read...

I'm not even a Knicks fan but I loved this book. It is a great retrospective of the game, when professional basketball television coverage was typically limited to one game a week. Each of the core Knicks players are featured, detailing the lives of Reed, Barnett, Bradley, DeBusschere, Monroe, Russell and others in the past, during the Knicks' heyday, and up until about the year 2010. Author Harvey Araton is an amazing writer and story teller. I was too young to experience the Knicks between 1968 and 1973 but he sets the stage of the humble beginnings and ensuing events perfectly. An amazing book that will never leave my sports shelf.